Being sincere also means that you can be sincerely wrong. And being wrong does not exclude professionals, like doctors and professors.
Let me explain what I’m on about.
You may be exhausted hearing about the Covid vaccine and anti-vaxxers, but I continue to be angered by how they are holding the majority of us hostage in our homes.
I have been on my own mission on my social media pages, confronting anti-vaxxers, who are spreading blatant lies and obvious nonsense to their followers.
And I have become even more vocal after reading first-hand accounts of people who have lost elderly loved ones to Covid; people who had fallen victim to the confusion and the lies.
I am also reading more and more first-hand accounts from doctors and nurses after they have treated dying Covid patients.
Almost always these are unvaccinated people who regret both their decision and the fact that they had been taken in by the fake news about the vaccines being dangerous.
I used to be frustrated by those who believe the lies, but I think I now have a better understanding of why older people are suspicious of vaccines and may therefore avoid getting it.
It’s got to do with the generation that they come from and their inability or unwillingness to keep up with the ever-evolving technological times.
Our senior citizens grew up in a time when information presented to them was taken at face value.
If someone told you something, there wasn’t any reason to doubt them.
Even if you did, there wasn’t a resource like Google, that allowed you to check the veracity of the information.
But these days, information is freely available.
The major difference between now and then, is that these days any idiot with an internet device can distribute their “facts” to a global audience and that means not all modern information can be trusted.
I’m sure some of these individuals are acting sincerely and often have good intentions, which brings me to my opening statement about scientific accuracy and sincerity being mutually exclusive.
Last week, leading heart surgeon Dr Susan Vosloo got herself into all sorts of trouble after she posted a video with what is being termed “problematic comments” about the vaccine.
Here is a highly respected and decorated individual who many ordinary people wouldn’t have any reason to doubt yet she obfuscates one of the most important principles of scientific research – the fact that it is about consensus.
It makes sense to believe a result that was arrived at by a scientist in his lab, after other independent scientists elsewhere were able to repeat the experiment with the same outcome.
That is the consensus and there is overwhelming consensus for the vaccines being safe and effective, whereas there is little to no consensus for the opposing theories.
Just like pornography, this is probably one of the biggest unintended consequences of the internet; the fact that fringe science is being presented to the common man as an alternative fact that’s being suppressed by the mainstream.
It’s being suppressed because it is dangerously wrong.
And just because you have a large following, or a university degree, doesn’t mean you should be allowed to endanger the lives of people who don’t know any better.
This is where I want to quote one of the greatest minds of our time, astrophysicist Neill de-Grasse Tyson, who talks about how social media content should always be taken with a pinch of salt, simply because the algorithms feed into our confirmation bias; our internal narratives.
So while some people insist on pushing back with their own facts, science is always correct, whether you believe in it or not.
He talks about the differences between personal, political and objective truths, the latter being irrefutable, no matter what.
This is where Vosloo and anti-vaxxers falter, because Tyson argues that while the true sceptic must question what they are unsure of, they are also prepared to change their minds when faced with consensus, logic and evidence.